Numerous posts have come to my attention recently of people rejecting conversation. Excellently argued pieces all, the gist is that most people don’t want to have a conversation with a brand, so this is not what social media marketing is about.

Where I disagree is that I think these pieces take the idea of conversation too literally. As argued elsewhere on this blog, social media is really just the internet being used as it was always intended to be used - to enable conversation and dialogue. Anyone unsure about this point should watch the first episode of the BBC’s frankly excellent Digital Revolution program, which outlines the origins of the internet, and it’s role in counter-culture, free speech and open conversation.

So if Social Media is really just the internet returning full circle to a more open, free conversation, and rejecting the brochure-ware business-style sites that many brands felt comfortable with, then “conversation” becomes more than just literally “having a conversation with your customers”. There are many facets to this, but open conversation - the ability to talk with each other without being censored - is key to all of it. Brands can get involved in a variety of different ways, and below I’ve tried to outline a few of my early thoughts:

Facilitating the conversation. Brands can facilitate people having conversations through custom social networks, via applications such as Facebook and Ning or bespoke sites. At Reading Room, we’ve had successes with sites such as Fairtrade Towns and Taste The Glenlivet, by simply providing a platform for like-minded people to meet and discuss what they’re passionate about. Our Facebook page for the Department of Health is also proving to be a great place for people to meet and discuss the challenges of quitting smoking. The key to this is not to regard is as a direct conversation between brand and consumer, but simply a place where the brand facilitates conversation between people. The brand acts as ambassador, setting guidelines, explaining why people could have posts removed (use of very bad language for example) but aside from that, allowing the conversation - and with it the community - to develop organically.

The benefits to being seen as the facilitator should be fairly straight-forward. It brings a closer connection to your brand (you are seen as someone who helps to create their world, who facilitates what they find fun and enjoyable); it also gives you a place where you can test ideas and discuss new concepts, and if required, it offers you a direct mouthpiece to some of the most dedicated advocates of your brand.

Starting the conversation. Let’s be quite clear - there is nothing new about this idea. Good advertising has started conversations for years. My argument is just that it is the conversation - the passing of your message on a peer-to-peer level - that is the powerful part of this process. And the internet makes it easier to pass on the conversation to more people. Anyone talking about virals really just means something that is cool enough to get people talking to each other about it. If they do that talking face-to-face, over email, or over a social network, is there really any difference?

Again, with Taste The Glenlivet, we successfully started conversations with in-depth articles on interesting subjects - these were interesting enough for people to start talking with each other on our site. Look at projects such as Andy Goodridge’s Code Organ or the ongoing work that Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon do for Sony Music (all projects I have to admit that I had nothing to do with, other than retweeting them and suffering a sense of professional jealousy). These are projects designed to do one thing - get people passing it on, talking about your brand, having a conversation about you. And they’re brilliantly successful at it.

Having the conversation. This is a good example of how digital changes the way we do business, and not just the way we do marketing. The value to having a conversation from a marketing point of view might be limited (Neicole Crepeau makes the very valid point that most marketing doesn’t support a message to customer ratio of 1:1). However, the value to a business, and ongoing effect this could have on a brand, is much greater. Ford in the US use Twitter to help with customer service, actively responding to customer queries. There’s a great example somewhere of them helping one customer locate a place to purchase a replacement key for a spare fuel tank. Now that’s a niche request. You can image the person thinking “how on earth am I going to find this”, and tweeting more out of desperation than any real belief they’d get an answer. Imagine what a great experience it is to get a reply helping you, and not just from a friend, but from Ford themselves. Twitter and other real time social networks allow you to perform active customer service; not waiting for the customer to call you, but actively finding and solving problems. Answering customer queries and problems on a wider scale also helps position you as an expert in that particular field.

Behaving in a human way here is key. No-one wants to talk to the loud, boastful oaf in the corner of the pub. I always liken it to chatting someone up at a bar - would you start by loudly talking about yourself, or by paying them a small compliment and asking them a question about themselves? And remember, the internet is open, which means your conversations are typically available for everyone to see. The internet amplifies conversation - good and bad - so when you reply or engage with one person you’re actually reaching a whole host of others. Just taking Twitter as an example, if anyone replies to your brand, all of their followers can see that response. Not all may pay attention of course, but the potential for your conversation to get noticed is there.

Listening to the conversation. Numerous tools exist to allow you to listen to conversation on the internet, all of them with their own benefits and flaws. The important element of this is that you can actively search out what people are saying about you, listen and learn. Most companies are willing to spend time and money on focus groups to research what people think about particular issues, but yet seem strangely reticent to see what people are really saying on the internet. Listening to the conversation will give you insight into what people really want from your brand, and should probably inform your ongoing attempts to produce something that starts a conversation.

That’s sort of what I’m thinking right now. I’ve probably missed a load of other examples or opportunities, and would love to hear other people’s thoughts.

Just a quick note: some of the examples I’ve used above are from the agency where I work, Reading Room, and whilst the work is ours (and very proud we are of it too), any views expressed above are of course just mine.

Images like this make me laugh. Basically, this is explaining how information flows through social media sites, and it accidentally highlights what I think are two core problems that come up time and again when talking to “Social Media Gurus”:

1. A lack of understanding of the changing nature of the landscape. 2 years ago, this chart would have included MySpace (at least if it was drawn in the UK). 18 months ago you might have seen Reddit rather than StumbledUpon. The internet changes so rapidly that any explanation of how information is passed on that relies on specific sites will be out of date before it can be of any use.
2. A failure to document or include the creative process. Point one is pretty inconsequential next to this. That little box at the top that says “Content Created” simply has two arrows that point down to Twitter and Digg, as if any content anyone creates simply immediately hits the Digg homepage, or immediately gets thousands of retweets. Only content that is genuinely interesting will see this effect happening. It’s hard creating content like this. But then it always has been.

What this diagram does is try to explain the virtual water cooler, but the trick has always been to create content that people want to talk about round the water cooler to begin with. The requirement for a brilliant creative idea hasn’t changed.

It seems to me that some people think that “social media” removes the need for creative ideas; like somehow the sheer modernity of the internet will turn whatever content you produce into something that everyone will look at.

The truth is that because people now have so many things that they can spend their attention on, the need for brilliant creative ideas is more important than ever. This is what will create the content that people will talk about, whether they’re online OR offline.

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Now, I know this because I watched it on TV. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in the crowd. I was home, watching it on TV. How surprising then when Mel B announced that Cocker’s stage invasion would have to remain the preserve of the people who were there to see it, as no footage existed of the alleged incident. Eh? I know the footage exists, I’ve seen it.

So, is this some sort of conspiracy by ITV to hide the shameful past of the Brits? They seemed quite happy to feature Brandon Block. Perhaps 30 Rock is right, and The Black Crusaders are pressurising ITV into editing out history. Who knows, but Cocker’s stage invasion would have been my number one moment of Brits history, if only it existed.

So in its place, I have to nominate The KLF for best performance at The Brits. Surely a no-brainer: in 1992,The KLF take to the stage to perform 3am Eternal with their friends Extreme Noise Terror. What resulted is, to me, a classic Brits performance and far better than the saccharine bullshit of Take That’s Beatles Medley. In fact, if you look closely you can see Bill Drummond fire a machine gun into the crowd (about 2.30 in). Awesome.

“… it’s the principle behind it that counts, not the trio …”

And of course he’s right. It’s the principle behind what you’re trying to do that is important, not necessarily how you get there. And I think 2010 is going to be the year of understanding the principles of digital.

Russell Davies wrote in UK Wired last month about the transparency that technology has given us, and how this has changed our lives. He was talking with reference to Government and Government data, but apply it to brands and business and it still holds true: what the internet has really given us is transparency. And what this results in is what Alan Wolk refers to as The Real Digital Revolution.

Advertising can no longer clever language and use flashy imagery to mask a poorly designed product or service. That’s because at its core, Web 2.0/Social Media/Conversational Media (your choice) are word-of-mouth recommendations that have been transcribed and made searchable. The result is that all of a products faults are instantly visible to anyone with an internet connection and the ability to use Google

And this is what the internet is, and this is how it changes communications. It forces people to be transparent. And you can’t just choose to try a little on the side and see if you like it. You can spend as much money as you like on advertising your brilliant customer service, but Google will tell me pretty much instantly if this is true or not. It’s Google as Planet-Sized Bullshit Detector.

I think transparency is the real principle of digital. And I think switched on people have understood this for a while, and this year I think we’ll see more people understanding this and better, more effective work being produced as a result of it.

Now, if you’re still interested, a few other themes I think you’ll be seeing this year:

There may be a wider understanding of the power of digital to affect business rather than just communications. Digital agencies will need to have a greater understanding of business strategy and ICT strategy. Agencies that can understand business strategy, technology AND provide cutting edge creative will be able to work for clients across more than just marketing, which will give them a distinct advantage. Perhaps Sapient’s (relatively) recent acquisition of Nitro lends a little credence to this theory.

Despite lots of other very clever people saying the opposite, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that 2010 will continue to be a year of iPhone dominance and not the year of the Google Phone. Based around the idea that the main reason to get a smart phone is the applications you can then put on it, and there is nothing slicker than Apple’s App Store. Note I didn’t say cheaper or even bigger. Just as iTunes is to me the home for purchasing digital music, the App Store will be the place to purchase apps, and therefore interest in the iPhone will continue to grow. In order to break it’s dominance, you need to build a better surrounding infrastructure as well as a better product.

Lots more devices will have internet connections - fridges, seat backs in planes, coffee tables, whatever. The proliferation of these devices will bring a much sharper focus onto interface design. Unlike browser-based design, there are no heuristic shortcuts available, no common way of interacting with the interface. Effectively, as yet, there are no defined rules. This makes it an exciting space and you’ll see some fantastic innovation alongside a lot of horrible failure as people establish these rules.

Finally, of course, don’t expect all that much to change. We are at heart a species that fears change, and this will mean you should probably expect to see a lot of what you saw last year, and probably the year before that too.

What Jimmy says is, I think, quite brilliant:

“In the consumer space, people aren’t going to do it for strategic business reasons, they’re going to do it because it’s fun.”

As clever as Victor & Spoils like to think they are, their approach does rather feel like auditioning freelancers and giving the gig to the best one. It doesn’t really have a collaborative feel to it in the same way as, say, editing a Wikipedia page does. The same with the Pepperami experiment. These people call it crowdsourcing because it’s a buzzword that the marketing press are currently into and they know they’ll get coverage. But their projects naturally exclude the majority of consumers, being as they are openly targeted at design and creative professionals. Who, whatever you might think, are not the majority.

Crowdsourcing should allow anyone to get involved. MyStarbucksIdea was a great example of crowdsourcing: open to all, and produced genuinely useful ideas submitted by genuine Starbucks consumers. Same for Walkers Crisps, which again allowed anyone to take part. And for that very same reason, Victor & Spoils isn’t really crowdsourcing at all. It is a great way of getting freelance creative teams to submit their ideas for free and then only pay for the very best of them. But that is surely something that freelance creative teams won’t be happy about for very long.

Crowdsourcing is a great idea, and I think there is incredible potential, particularly around how a brand engages with their consumers; it’s taking new ideas and using them in new ways. What Pepperami did was use this idea of “crowdsourcing” to help produce an old-school campaign. You’re still going to get a 30 second ad spot, it’s just written by a freelance creative. Honestly - how is this different to using a variety of freelancers?

But using the idea of crowdsourcing to connect directly with your consumers, to involve them in a deeper level with your brand, and have them actually help to create output they’ll then later consume themselves, well, that’s sorta cool, right?

Since we got back off of holiday about 2 weeks ago, I’ve found that every morning I’ve been about 2 minutes late for the train. It had begun to get quite annoying, as it had got to the point that I was missing trains, or having to race like mad up the stairs to the platform. Not being much of a morning person, my routine was always timed to give me the longest possible time in bed without having to rush (rushing makes my mornings significantly worse). I had always been pretty good at timing it perfectly, but since getting back off holiday, I always seemed to be a couple of minutes out. I would miss the train by 20 seconds, or find myself diving through the train doors at the last minute.

At first I put it down to the jetlag, and then to the fact that I just hadn’t quite got back into the swing of things; holiday blues. Today, I finally worked out what it actually was.

My watch was 2 minutes slow.

When we landed back at Heathrow, I set my watch time back to GMT. When we got back to the flat, I reset the radio and oven clocks (as both were turned off whilst we were away) from my watch. The whole house was 2 minutes slow, and today I just happened to be listening to the headlines at 8am when I looked at my watch, showing 7.58am.

Given that - despite occassional claims to the contrary - I’m not a complete idiot, what interested me most is why I hadn’t noticed before. It was so easy to just assume that time was an absolute. What my watch said was the time WAS the time, no questions asked. And this is true of so many things. We assume they just ARE.

I think one of the tricks to having good ideas is to be able to move out of viewing the world as absolutes; to not be tricked and blinded by the obvious.After all, how often have you heard someone utter the phrase “it was just staring me right in the face …”

I thought we all decided that there wasn’t much of a difference any more anyway.

But then I read The Ad Contrarian, who seemed real angry about a bunch of stuff, but principally how much toss digital agencies seem to speak, and then I got to thinking that, in all fairness, if someone came to me and said “Building a conversation strategy will allow us to visually see our complete marketing ecosystem” I’d end up being pretty angry about it too, although possibly less witty with my responses.

And then I saw this great YouTube video that reminded me of a few consultants I’ve met over

And then I realised why Ad Contrarian was so angry, because so many people pertaining to be “digital experts” talk such an amazing amount of absolute rubbish that quite literally anyone could say. And expect kudos for saying it.
This isn’t good for the digital industry, because crap like that gives food to the people who want to claim it’s not mature, it’s not business focussed, it’s not capable of delivering proper results. I don’t want to talk about visually seeing anything, but what I would like to comment on is one of the comments made by Tom Wanek at the bottom of another Ad Contrarian article:

I’m alarmed at the number of small business owners who struggle with foundational marketing principles. For example, the idea of speaking to the customer’s felt need is a foreign concept to most. Social media won’t help if your message is irrelevant. Now here’s another point to consider: With so much of social media being irrelevant noise, it’s becoming much more difficult to cut through the clutter, making it more critical than ever that marketers learn to communicate clearly and with power

Tom, social media (digital, the internet, whatever) isn’t meant to broadcast irrelevant messages. It’s meant to help you find what message is relevant. That’s what people mean when they talk about the power of conversation - it allows you to have individual, customised, one-to-one relationships with your consumers. Which means a two-way relationship, and not just thinking in terms of broadcasting messages to your consumer. Two-way conversations mean you listen as well as speak.

Digital continues to have a huge impact upon business. In many ways it completely changes the nature of how businesses communicate, and this is principally because it forces business communication to be more human. Humans communicate through conversation, through two-way dialogue and through ideas of honesty and trust. Sorry to sound all naive and hippy-like there, but it’s true, and it’s what business needs to learn. All these “social media fail” stories? They’re businesses breaking bonds of trust and honesty, and being outed in a very public arena for being shitsticks.

This is the power of digital. Not “First, by socializing all media, the engagement experience is cyclical and ongoing. Second, by identifying conversation groups (social graphs) and tapping directly into them and then connecting them together, the long tail of niche market segments become your mass or ‘mainstream’ media play.”

That’s just bullshit bingo, and the more we speak like that, the harder it is to convince the doubters that we have anything interesting or relevant to say. So please, can we stop?

Thanks

Our clients ask us quite a lot about Social Media, and what their strategy should be to deal with it. My standard answer seems to illicit quite a lot of confusion - “be yourself”. I’m not sure why, perhaps because “being yourself” is something that is quite foreign to many large companies. But also, I think it’s because people still regard digital as something new, different and scary. When of course it isn’t. The internet is just a technology that allows communication on a scale and speed that has never been seen before. But it’s still people communicating.

It’s like record companies complaining about music piracy and how the internet will kill music. It’s not going to kill music. It’s not even going to kill record labels (which is not the same thing as music incidently), given that  a recent study in Denmark showed that those who are most likely to pirate music are also most likely to purchase it online. And in fact, today a new study was published in the British media (please excuse the link to The Daily Mail) backing the same statement. And anyway, sharing music with each other is nothing new. In fact, being able to share music you love is sort of fundamental, right? It’s just people communicating.

My favourite band in the world is The Pixies. I first heard Doolittle on my friend’s battered tape player back in 1992 on, you guessed it, a taped copy of the original album. Taped. Copied. Pirated.

I now own every single album The Pixies made. I own B-side collections, best-off compilations, rare releases of the Purple Tapes demos, a live DVD and even a DVD of them playing Newport Folk Festival. I’ve purchased all of these off the back of one pirated cassette tape that I played over and again until the tape wore out. I even own Bam Thowk for fuck’s sake.

The point is, of course, that pirating music isn’t actually anything new. In fact, it is all to do with the fundamental human desire to share things you like with people you like. And the internet makes it easier to share things than ever before. This is a good thing. If we share your product with someone else, they’re more likely to buy it in the future. This is what you as a corporation want right?

And of course this is how it’s always worked. My friend plays me music they like. I like it. I listen to it. Eventually I might buy it. Funnily enough there is no evidence to suggest that listening to a pirated copy of music actually then stops me buying the real thing. There’s no corrolation there.

So the internet is just people being people. And this is what I mean when I tell clients to be themselves. Find the people who are passionate about your organisation and get them talking to other people. Do it yourselves. I mean, if you’re not passionate about your own organisation, surely there’s a problem there.

I meet people who love the company they work for, genuinely talented passionate people who can talk for hours about what they do and where they do it, because they’re interested in it. Yet, they’re asking me for a “social media strategy” as if I have the secret recipe for instant internet success. Sorry, but there isn’t one. Just do what you’re doing already. Passionate people are interesting. Interesting people write interesting stories. Interesting stories spread.

Amelia Torode has a great post from her work with the IPA Social initiative. Her point is simple: “technology changes, people don’t”, and I like it because it expands on the idea of exactly why it is that people use social media. One of her main points is around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and how social media can help to fulfil them. And as she points out, Maslow defined his hierarchy around 1934. There is nothing new here.

Or as Paul Graham said at iMedia earlier in the year - “social media is just people chatting”.

(picture in this post from birgerking’s flickr feed, reproduced under a creative commons licence)